Smooth Shopping Ahead

Professors’ inboxes overflowing with students’ well-crafted and earnest inquiries, lecture halls bursting with enthusiastic young men and women, a palpable spirit of excitement and possibility in the air—shopping period abounds in strange phenomena. But before its peculiar energy vanishes into the humdrum of the semester’s subsequent weeks, let us consider some improvements that could enhance students’ shopping experience and render the week an even more productive introduction to the semester.

Shopping period has long been a time of introductions, as students become acquainted with new courses, professors, and ideas. This year, however, shopping period itself was introduced to something new, albeit only to Harvard: modern technology. For the first time, students this fall registered and assembled their study cards online, saving the College and its students time, effort, and—in the former’s case—money. This new development has been positive, but it is not without its flaws. Students who change their schedules during shopping week are vexed by the need to obtain an entirely new set of signatures from their professors, inconveniencing both students and professors, and making schedule modifications unnecessarily complicated.

Switching from print to electronic signatures would remedy this problem. Rather than requiring professors and advisers to physically sign paper copies of students’ electronic study cards, the Office of the Registrar could instead allow professors to electronically approve students’ enrollment requests, and could enable advisors to approve of a virtual study card with the click of a mouse, not the scrawl of a pen.

Improvements to shopping period should not come from the Registrar alone; professors should post full syllabi on their course web sites well before the first class meeting—in place of the partial or nonexistent syllabi often found online in advance of this semester’s shopping period—so that students can get a more complete sense of the course content and expectations. Posting lecture videos, either from previous years of a course or recorded during shopping period, would also give students a better sense of a professor’s pace and style—important variables not always evident during an introductory meeting. These modifications would make it vastly easier to shop two (or more) courses that meet simultaneously.

Professors and departments should also modify their lottery procedures to ensure that all students have a fair opportunity to enroll in popular courses. Many courses conduct lotteries during their initial meetings, disadvantaging those students with shopping week schedule conflicts. Professors should instead conduct lotteries online, so that all students have an opportunity to participate.

Finally, all courses that section—notably introductory language classes—should make the final deadline for choosing a section as late as possible. Many of these courses require students to commit to a particular meeting time within the first day of shopping period, an unreasonable demand for students still unsure of the hours that they will be available. Pushing back the sectioning deadline wouldn’t preclude these classes from meeting during the first week of the semester; students could instead attend any section of the course for which they plan to register during this first week, committing firmly to a section only after their schedules had been decided.

Shopping period is an essential part of the Harvard academic year because of the assistance it gives us in making informed decisions about courses to take. These simple modifications could make shopping period an even smoother and happier—and more unusual—time for students and professors alike.